Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Why copyright is really-really-really dead
Author: Eric Soroos Posted: 7/3/2000; 4:56:05 PM Topic: Why copyright is really-really-really dead Msg #: 18318 (In response to 18317) Prev/Next: 18317 / 18319
While not foolproof, the concept sounds very difficult to hack and would probably cause most people not to bother...It appears that you need closed hardware for this to work.
My reading of this is that they are encrypting each song for the particular player, and that player would have to have a unique (probably signed) private/public key pair. So now you have to protect that public/private key pair. For every player. Even the $20 ones. You will also need to protect the servers and the people making the players.
My guess is that this will be attacked by sending the server a comprimised key, then decrypting the return values. Or, figure out how to encode two players with the same key. Perhaps someone will leave a key lying around (like dvd/decss).
Unless you Trust the hardware, this sort of thing is fundamentally impossible to do. Somewhere in there is a single point of failure. It will be found, probably near the time of most embarrasing possible failure.
Don't just take my word for it, From CryptoGram
Against all of these systems -- disappearing e-mail, rights management for music and videos, fair game playing -- there are two types of attackers: the average user and the skilled attacker. Against the average user anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker nothing works. And even worse, most systems need to be secure against the smartest attacker.eric
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